About us

We are a team of 16 researchers exploring the spectacular effects of new media on today's youth. We are on a fascinating journey of discovery that tells us how radically the world has transformed over the last few years, and the wonderful possibilities that lie ahead. Through quantitative and qualitative research we are finding out what clicks with youth, how they use new media to bring meaning into their lives, how laptops and cell phones become second brains, how much the use of technology defines them. Sharing the same age cohort, and space-time dimension ourselves, the distinction between them and us, as well as between researcher and subject, blurs.

Our first client is Gannett Co Inc, USA's largest newspaper company, owner of 90 daily newspapers, 22 television stations, and more than 130 U.S.-based Web sites. Gannett is interested to know how technology challenges conventional media and how it impacts young media consumers. Where do youth get news from today? What kind of news are they most concerned about? What do they look for online? How do they use the Internet and mobile phones to communicate, learn and interact? What makes multitasking multifaceted mobile youth tick, and what does that mean for media companies? These are some of the questions we will answer for Gannett.

AOL Data

AOL blundered when it released three months' worth of search queries for 630,000 of their users onto the web. AOL's folly was our fantasy. We extracted 21 million queries, and conducted detailed analysis of this data.
According to Nielsen Net-ratings AOL ranks fourth in the list of top five search engines. This data was therefore representative of the most frequent queries on the Internet. We broke down this massive amount of data into chronological portions, avoiding redundancies in queries. We could achieve an efficient data structure optimized both for space and for available computational resources.
Next we performed analysis on these broken-down chunks, to get an idea about which queries may have been put in by the 18-25 year age cohort. We devised a novel semi-supervised learning algorithm based on expectation maximization, computing the maximum estimate of parameters generated on the list of queries. We used this algorithm to work out the probability of users belonging to the 18-25 year old age category--alternatively queries that almost surely came from this age category.
Through this algorithmic sampling of the data set we have been able to sample not just queries that represent foremost market-demand but also the long tail. We have at this point come up with a thousand most frequent queries and are figuring out which of this must certainly come from 18-25 year olds. We have labeled them based on a taxonomy we devised that frames the percentage of interests. Categories in the taxonomy like ‘gaming’ ‘shopping’ (e-commerce) ‘music’ or ‘social networking’ seem to relate most to the youth of today.
Work on the AOL data is still on; Ankur and Harsh are the core team for this endeavor. To Ankur goes the credit of devising the tailored form of the expectation-maximization algorithm. At the New Media Innovation Lab, there certainly is no dearth of innovating geniuses!

ASU Survey

We conducted a survey of 1700 students at ASU Tempe Campus, to assess how youth of today engage with technology in their interactive behaviors. We also wanted to determine their level of engagement with the Internet, as an apparatus that enriches their lives. This data collected from 1700 undergrads were coded and analyzed, providing a wealth of information.
Factor analysis of this data revealed three kinds of Internet users: Socials, those that use the net to commune, network and create shared experiences, like users of myspace, facebook, flickr or youtube; the information hounds, those that get their news and information primarily from the Internet; and the utilitarians, those that use the net in a structured and focused way.
Right now we are at a stage of cross tabulating the data, which will give us valuable information on the structure and focus of particular Internet user groups. We have found out that gaming, music and news capture a large chunk of the youth’s interest in the new media.

Usability Testing

Over the course of three weeks, 100 ASU students were given the opportunity to provide detailed usability feedback on a number of leading websites. These news and social networking sites (including AZCentral.com, Yahoo!, YouTube, MySpace) were evaluated for their usability in the areas of functionality, content and design. Are these sites easy to navigate? Is the information clearly presented in a highly intuitive design? What did users have difficulty with? What would they want changed?
The usability testing started with unstructured browsing. In this stage, we evaluated where users naturally flowed through the site, and what issues they encountered along the way. Next, we gave them some tasks, such as to find a news item, or a business information, or a local band. Users had to rate these tasks in the range of 1-5, from easy to difficult.
Yahoo's clean design and easy navigability won praise; MySpace was commended for its customizability. The local newspaper websites studied here were found to be great reservoirs of local information. However, there were concerns expressed about clutter, the effectiveness of the search function, and consistency of design.
At the end the users were as intrigued as we were! As a little token of appreciation, they got to walk away with cool music store gift vouchers!

tunedig.com

Our focus this semester is on our local music website tunedig.com will offer to music lovers. Ljiljana and Sam Castro are our graphic designers. Sam Gavin and Marlena are the feature designers.
We currently have a MySpace profile - look us up through our contact email tunedig@gmail.com - to keep in touch with our bands, and our hands-on approach to the local scene has already generated buzz about our project. We're dedicated to local talent and can't wait to showcase the cream of the crop on tunedig.com!

Introduction to NMILers

Tom Mohr
Tom Mohr, the founding-director of New Media Innovation Lab was President of Knight Ridder Digital until June, 2006. Before joining Knight Ridder, Mohr also held executive positions at the Nashville Tennessean, Universal Talkware and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He has served on the executive committee of the boards of CareerBuilder, Classified Ventures and ShopLocal.
Tom leads a team of bright young researchers in a democratic and stimulating work environment. He is an industry leader, completely passionate about new media, and an active blogger himself.
“To innovate on the Web with a team of smart and talented students from multiple disciplines in an academic environment is thrilling,” Mohr says. “I am sure I will learn as much from them as they will from me. The fact that this is real work for a real client – not just theoretical work – makes for a compelling opportunity that I relish.”
At every stage of research Tom conducts intense brainstorming sessions with his team. He inspires a wonderful work ethic; his enthusiasm is infectious.

Lisa Brunsvold, 23
Spanish Major graduating in May 07’! Ready to expose the local music scene with our bands and venues team.

Marlena Shirley, 22
Marlena is a Marketing major at the W.P Carey School of Business. She is part of the product team as well as the bands and venues team.

Sam Castro, 28
Global Business Management and Leadership Student at ASU. Working in both Design and Quality Assurance.

Chris Sheppard, 31
Chris is a Masters of Mass Communication student graduating in May 2007 from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Chris is the Tunedig website project manager.

Debjani Chakravarty, 29
Debjani is a graduate student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her focus area is print journalism. She is in charge of research at the New Media Innovation Lab. She is also coordinating the contacts database for Project Tunedig.

Kaushik Krishna Raghuraman, 22
Kaushik is a graduate student at Ira Fulton School of Engineering majoring in Electrical Engineering and is heading the engineering team. Web development has been his passion and has many projects to his credits.
For more information and/or to contact him please visit, public.asu.edu/~kkraghur

Le Xu, 23
Le is a Computer Science major at the School of Computing and Informatics. He is part of the engineering team.

Deepak Kamalanathan, 22
Deepak is a Masters student in Electrical Engineering. He is part of the engineering team.

Anjan Kumar Meenakshisundaram, 22
Anjan is a Masters student in Computer Science and Engineering. He is part of the engineering team.

Ljiljana Ciric, 26
Lily is a senior at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the lead Tunedig designer.

Brandon Wong, 22
Brandon is a Senior Media Production Major in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is part of the Bands and Venues Team.

Harsh Kapoor, 23
Harsh is a graduate student at Ira Fulton school of engineering majoring in Computer Science. He is part of engineering team, NMIL.

Sam Gavin, 21
Sam is a broadcast journalism junior, and is currently news director at the Blaze 1260 AM. He is leader of the content team, comprising Product and Bands & Venues teams.

Vaishnavi Bobjee 23
Vaishnavi is a graduate student at Ira Fulton school of engineering majoring in Material Science. She is part of engineering team, NMIL.

Nicole Girard, 28
Nicole is a graduate student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. She is part of the bands and venues team.

Hillary Lewis, 23
Hillary Lewis is a graduate student at the W.P. Carey School of business. She is part of the bands and venues team.